Towards the techno-social Uncanny

*

Towards the techno-social Uncanny

ALEXANDER MATTHIAS GERNER

Abstract

This paper explores a technical unfinished half-method [Halbzeug] of a metaphorology (Blumenberg) of the technological other in its variations and the philosophical mise-en-scène of the techno-social uncanny. The roboticist Mori had revived the concept of a technological uncanny in human machine interaction in the spatial metaphor derived from a diagram of an uncanny valley in the reaction of a human being shaking an artificial hand in order to show why we feel a certain eeriness in relation to technological artefacts, a topic that gains importance today to reflect human technological automata relations with robots/AI/Avatars that mimic and socially resonate with humans and may even drive further technological transhumanism. Although in an artefact design approach uncanniness is said to be avoided in the human-like automaton-human encounter this paper dwells on the critic of techno-social otherness avoidance by technological overcoming of obstacles and thus argues for a cybernetic uncanny that can’t be avoided. This paper introduces in a broader sense than Mori’s a philosophical dramaturgy of Emmanuel Levinas’ temporal notion of the relation to the other, including a preliminary metaphorological variation of the temporal techno-social uncanny.

Keywords: metaphorology, philosophy of technology, techno-social uncanny, technological transhumanism, temporality.

1.

Introduction

H

ow we think, present and represent time as its Logos has a long

human history, and metaphors and mythological approaches to

time are intrinsic to time itself. Whatever we do with our limited

time independently of the mode we refer to time and of our experience of

temporality, we never or almost never avoid to speak in a mythological,

metaphorical non-direct language, in images or even visions and

dramat-urgies of mise-en-scènes about pragmatic horizons in which time acts. Even

when supposedly uncanniness is measured in a technical human-artefact

relation, we refer to a metaphor such as the uncanny valley to express our

thoughts in a timeline in which our reaction changes from uncanniness

to familiarity with the technical object. Therefore the “classical ordering

of time” – as Bernhard Waldenfels

_{puts it well – will develop a “particular}

* Centro de Filosofia das Ciências, Departamento de História e Filosofia das Ciências Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal.

coping strategy that will work against time’s power,” and its

metaphoro-logical groundings in three fundamental aspects that this paper develops:

a)

The strategy of the demythologization of time, in which time should not

appear as an impersonated conceptual persona as a time sovereign  –

for instance, in the Greek chronological tradition, Time’s mythological

father Chronos

_{eats its children – or any other symbolic, metaphorical}

or anonymous power, so that one strategy of disempowering time  –

sovereignty defines identity not in temporal terms, but in spatial terms

as fundamentally timeless, or “out of time” that is reassessed by a

meta-phorology

_{of the uncanny of social time of the other, a ‘face-to-face’ in}

the sense of Lévinas. But instead of Chronos we might be haunted by

fears of missing out; or worse, we might not even notice what scares us,

as in ‘an enhancement society’ today

_.

b)

submitting time to a binary order or schemata such as material and

form or outer and inner time, psychological and physical time. These

1. Waldenfels, Bernhard, “Time-Lag”, In: Bernhard Waldenfels, The Question of the Other. The Tang Chun-I Lecture for 2004. Hong Kong, The Chinese University Press 2007, 53-66. Here: 54-55.

2. Thus in Nietzsche the monsteriosity is not attributed to a specific conceptual personae and a narrative of mythical time – Chronos – that eats its children, but to the process of time as the principle of impossible return and necessary passing and thus the impossibility of running backwards, producing always already a past – an “es war”. Therefore the fight against decay and vanishing is useless in the sense of Nietzsche because it is a “prayer” of “Insanity” that the justice and law of time is, that time has to necessarily eat its own children-“Und dies ist selber Gerechtigkeit, jenes Gesetz der Zeit, dass sie ihre Kinder fressen muss” a necessary principle of life the consequence would be a nihilistic ethos of a spectator of decay, catastrophe or apocalypse: “Alles vergeht, darum ist Alles werth zu vergehen!” Nietzsche, Friedrich (1988). Also sprach Zarathustra II, 180/30, Kritische Studienausgabe, hg. V. Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montanari (dtv/de Gryther) München. 3. Metaphorology is not a new metaphor theory but a pragmatic stance on how to work

on metaphor use. This means a metaphorology is a non-metaphysical treatment of the pragmatic role that metaphysical structures, as for example “absolute” grounding metaphors play in our thought and for our hypothetical reasoning and even in our scientific language, that following Descartes tries to avoid preliminary forms of expression. According to Blumenberg (1960) we can distinguish: 1) Mere additional “preliminary” metaphors, easily to be substituted by clearer descriptive or technical language or other formalizations 2) Metaphors as a) an indicators of unclear concepts and b) – I would add – underdeveloped relations between concepts and their metaphors and c) metaphors as indicators of emerging knowledge fields, crossing, converging or diverging and shifting catalytic and take-over of knowledge “fields” (with all its positive heuristic aspects) and important for further research and development of (inter-)disciplinary knowlege and theory formation 3) Absolute founding metaphor of thought as a signal of in-conceptuality (Unbegrifflichkeit). 4. Armin Grunwald, “Are we heading towards an Enhancement Society?” In: Hildt,

Elisabeth, Franke, Andreas G. (eds.). Cognitive Enhancement. An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Edited by Dordrecht: Springer Dordrecht, 2013: 201-216.

dichotomies of time in a radical phenomenological

_{tradition such as in}

Lévinas could be repositioned as time in an aesthetic world intertwined

with what it actually determines.

c)

Time conceived as a member of oppositions, such as time and space, time

and eternity, temporal flowing/flux vs. standing/static, following temporal

instances in succession or standing out of each other in extension. ‘Time

flies:’ we are almost always “running out of” time. Levinas’ concept of

social time distinguishes itself from classical Western concepts of time.

As the philosopher himself underlines the importance of his own

philo-sophical project as temporal in which the notion of a deformalization of

time is proposed as a paradoxical immemorial past and a future that will

never be my presence but is a condition of the other:

The essential theme of my research is the deformalization of the notion

of time. Kant says it is the form of all experience. All human experience

does in fact take on a temporal form. The transcendental philosophy

descended from Kant filled that form with a sensible content coming

from experience or, since Hegel, that form has led dialectically toward

a content. These philosophers never required, for the constitution of

that form of temporality itself, a condition in a certain conjuncture of

“matter” or events, in a meaningful content somehow prior to form. (…)

Perhaps what I have told you about the obligation toward the other prior

to all contract (a reference to a past that was never present!) and about

dying for the other (a reference to a future that will never be my present)

will seem to you, (…), like a preface to possible research.

To understand this deformalization of time let me put this in a

personal mise-en-scène: When my father was in the hospital dying, with a

heart valve disease, and it was too late for him to be medically treated, he

was given a morphine derivate of palliative medicine. This was a way to

partially relieve his symptomatic state of dyspnea, and to buy him some

time to take him out of the agony of not catching enough air to breathe.

Thus, being offered a pharmakon at times in commonly decided

palli-ative medicine praxis to take away the feeling of drowning inside his lungs

5. Waldenfels speaks of Husserl’s time having its own temportality as a ”logos in an aesthetic world”(Hua XVII, 297 cit in Waldenfels 2007, 55, that in Merleau Ponty is put forward as a “vortex” of time Cf. Waldenfels, Bernhard, Giuliani, Regula, “Wirbel der Zeit”, in: Waldenfels, Bernhard. Idiome Des Denkens: Deutsch-Französische Gedankengänge II. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005).

6. Emmanuel Lévinas, The Other, Utopia and Justice, in: Emmanuel Lévinas, Entre Nous. Thinking of the Other, Translated from the French by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav, (Columbia University Press: New York, 2009), 223-234, here: 232-233.

filling up permanently with liquid, was a form of being in a time that

rested. This medically and technically offered time  – at specific socially

programmed times in which no communication with his family members

was possible – although I might have been present at least once – I

expe-rienced him slip into ‘another other’ existential time-zone, which is absent

in any temporal world map. A possibility of sleep and dream was the base

for this time of his life? To take him out of an over-conscious programme

of self-reflexive taking-notice-of-himself-dying as a hyper-anxious time of

excessive solitude of existing merely towards his death. Then once, he

confounded me and my face with the face of his grandfather. He mistook

me and encountered by my proximate face someone he had deeply loved

before, when being a child. What in the end was not crucial was the

strangeness of misattributing my face to his grandfathers’, as my face

became an uncanny medium of diachronic

_{time, a kind of generational}

“experience misunderstood”. However, primarily, we were in our last alive

encounters and in an impossible ability in the face of death, a birth of an

a-synchronic time of a past that was never mine, and a future that would

never be his, nor synchronically ours, or of my children that never met

him: Not our death, but the death of a beloved other human being that we

encounter in front of our gaze in a ‘face to face’ encounter (“autri

_{”): this is}

at the heart of the anxiety of losing love, and it most seriously lies before

us as a radical ethical stance that asks the question posed by Derrida and

Levinas: “Who is my neighbour?” And the question: What has the Other to

do with what forces me to think?

In this social lag of time within the encounter of the Other we are

always already too late to react to what affects us and always already too

early for the future that turns into a non-lived past, and this is my point

7. “Diachrony, through the diastasis or dephasing of the instant and the recuperation of the divergency by retention, shows itself as a continuous and indefinite time in memory and in history, that is, a time that can be assembled in a present.” Lévinas Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Originally published as Autrement qu’etre ou au-deLa de l’essence, Phaenomenologica 54 (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1991), 162.

8. Cf. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Sozialität Und Alterität: Modi Sozialer Erfahrung. (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), 61. In the note 21 a distinction into a timeless eternal alterity, the Other as absolute and in capital letter, and a human-based social based alterity that goes through the medium of singlar human beings and concrete inbetween encounters is hinted at: „Zur singulären Form des autri, die bei Levinas den anderen Menschen meint in Unterschied zu l’Autre als dem absolut Anderen, vgl Delhom 2000, S.78-81, 103f. Thomas Bedorf schlägt vor, zwischen primärer unendlicher und sekundärer sozialer Andersheit zu unterscheiden (2010, S.139, 141, 149).

of view that the encounter with artefacts that resemble humans in their

dynamics of uncanniness will foster this encounter of the other.

I will now explore a pragmatic tool and unfinished technical

“Halbzeug”

_{of a metaphorology}

_{(Blumenberg) within the conceptual}

distance of a techno-social inconceptuality of time of the Other in Levinas

social alterity mise-en-scène of temporality in relation to uncanny

tech-nical artefacts.

2.

Towards a metaphorological variation of the techno-social Uncanny

We model

_{time with artefacts such as clocks – or calendars – in our}

9. For Blumenberg the introduction of the technical term of an industrial production process „Halbzeug“ is far from an idea of “half-knowledge” that could be interpreted as something not only substantially vague,but incorrect, faulty or defective, as the “Halbzeug” is a necessary step in the achievement of an enhanced outcome of a technical object, it is a still articulated to the semi-finished product mold and as such Halbzeug is used in Blumenberg as a meta-metaphor that lies at the pragmatic foundation of a principle unfinishable work on metaphors as a pragmatic model: “Was ich hier vorlege ist ja ohnehin nur Halbzeug, und die Perfektion und Lückenlosigkeit, mit der man über >das Sein< handeln kann, ist auf diesem Felde ganz unerrreichbar. “Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie. Kommentar von Anselm Haverkamp. (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt, 2013), 33. For Haverkamp the central idea of what a metaphorology is about, is exactly given in the industrial metaphor of Blumenberg`s use of “Halbzeug” as it shows a half-finished industrial technical mesh that is built of raw materiality and that is unfinished. While its utility has gaps, this imperfect tool can be used pragmatically and applied in the middle of the development process of (industrial) production: to access the modes of theoretical use, the standard of which can only be the truthful concept (Begriff), Halbzeuge are states of imperfect technisation and of inconceptuality. As Haverkamp explains well, the metaphor of Halbzeug shows how the standard between the raw material and the functional product, which has become a paradigm, the semi-finished industrial product makes the pragmatic epistemological essence of every metaphor tangible and raises it to the level Cassirer had in mind, in which an ambiguity prevails between functional optimization and mythical resubstantialization – an ambiguity that while longing for technical perfection, should tend to prevail as a metaphor. Cf. Anselm Haverkamp, “Kommentar“. In: Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie.  Kommentar von Anselm Haverkamp. (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt, 2013), 191-515, here: 230-321.

10. “(...) metaphorology seeks to burrow down to the substructure of thought, the underground, the nutrient solution of systematic crystallisations; but it also aims to show with what “courage” the mind preempts itself in its images, and how its history is projected in the courage of its conjectures.” Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Translated by Robert Savage. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 5.

11. Blumenberg denotes that metaphors are used as “implicative model.”: “This means that metaphors, in the function discussed here, do not need to appear as such in the lexical sphere of expression; but a collection of statements suddenly coalesces into a meaningful unity if the leading metaphorical representation from which these statements were ‘read

metaphorical and metaphysical language that with Hans Blumenberg as

a meta

_{-metaphorologist can give us a notion of how we pragmatically}

access the world with and working on temporal “founding” metaphors.

Blumenberg claims that the world as a clock without indicators had been

used as – I would add “uncanny” – a mechanical metaphysical explanation

of the mechanical world view

_{, i.e., time as a mechanism. In what follows,}

I will attempt to demonstrate how time in the meta-metaphor of the Other

as social encounter of a Face to Face is at Lévinas’ base of his radical

ethical philosophy that is different to a time of speech, a temporality of

forgetting and remembering, or even a time of the senses of movements

and rhythms

_.

When we revisit the rich history of Western ideas of time and diverse

thinking of a philosophy of time, we might find uncanny oppositions, time

off’ can be hypothetically ascertained.” Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Translated by Robert Savage. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 21.

12. Cristian Strub collapses the distinction of “Letztmetaphern” and Metametaphern that are not metaphors of metaphors but that show how we access our world in totality. For Strub, this Meta-metaphorology is from its very beginning a discipline of a critic of Metaphysics, as it negates that there could be a conceptual, methodological language that would be non-metaphoric. In this sense, a Meta-metaphorology acts as the destruction of the legitimacy claim of a transcendental meta-language. Cf. Strub, Christian, “Wer hat Angst vor grünen Gläsern? Eine These zur Historizität und Normativität der Metametaphorologie, In Alexander Friedrich, Petra Gehring, and Andreas Kaminski, eds. “Metaphern Als Strenge Wissenschaft.”,  Journal Phänomenologie 41/2014 (2014): 57-62.

13. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen für eine Metaphorologie, (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 2015), 101, in relation to the hypothetical access to phenomena of “organic” and “mechanical” background metaphorics states in relation to the world as machine and clockwork until the end of time: “Machines in the narrower sense (for transporting goods or laying siege) fall into this category by virtue of their ability to astonish the unknowing spectator; that is why the expression has accrued so much of its history in the theatre, where the effect on the spectator is no longer incidental. So far as I am aware, there is no precedent in Greek for the composite term Machina Mundi. (…) The nondescriptive and unspecific expression Machina Mundi is first endowed with a momentous specificity by the clockwork metaphor, suggesting the idea of a spring mechanism that, having once “been wound up, can be relied on to tick smoothly and continuously until the end of time. We get a sense of just how little our ‘machine’ has in common with the meaning of machina when we recall that the Middle Ages could isolate precisely these ‘mechanical’ components in Ingenium, the basis for the corresponding early forms in the Romance languages (Spanish: engenno; French: engin)”. Hans Blumenberg, “Paradigms for a Metaphorology”, 115-116. 14. “If all things were to remain the same to flow into one another, and if nothing stood out in

contrast to something else, then there would be no rhythm. One would always be stepping into the same river, and even this sameness would have nothing from which it could stand out. In this sense, rhythm takes on an elementary function of supporting order” Waldenfels, Bernhard, “Time  – Lag”, In: Bernhard Waldenfels,  The Question of the Other. The Tang

divided into twins, pairs, doubles or time and its ghosts or even

phenome-nological spectres

_{. These doubles of time are multiple, given in categories}

such as a) chronological time, determining an age of an (carbon-based

₎

object in a specified chronology vs. the order of a b) kairological time

of an event to happen in an order of a right time to decide in a being

that is conscious of its own economic time limits. Another example would

be the distinction of “Lebenszeit”, including Husserl’s universal “flow” of

immanent time-consciousness

_{and Weltzeit}

_(Blumenberg

_{), an}

resil-Chun-I Lecture for 2004. Hong Kong, The Chinese University Press 2007: 61.

15. “A specter of solipsism haunts transcendental phenomenology” Nicolas de Warren, Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 209; Cf. Laclau’s annotation that Derrida’s idea of production of techné is intrinsically linked to spectral spiritualization of trauma related to the sense of Freudian traumatic decentering of mankind after Marxism and after the instances responsible for time out  – of-joint alias traumata in human self-conservation strategies a) the Copernican decentering of Earth as out of the world’s centre b) the decentering as mankind’s biological descent (Darwin’s Evolution and human-ape descent as out of the evolutions center) the decentering of consciousness (the Power of the unconsciousness; Freud). Cf. Ernesto Laclau, “‘The Time Is out of Joint.’ ” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 85-96. https://doi.org/10.2307/465146. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. (New York: Routledge, 2011), specially 96-117.

16. Such a chronological method is the radiocarbon method, also known as radiocarbon dating, 14C; C14 dating or radiocarbon dating, or radiocarbon dating is a method for radiometric dating of carbon-containing materials, especially organic materials. The temporal application range is between 300 and about 60,000 years. Cf., Willard Libby, Radiocarbon Dating. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955).

17. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstesens (1893-1917). Ed. R. Boehm. (= Husserliana X). (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969).

18. The idea that we live in a world time an epochal “age of machine intelligence” comes with an old metaphor of taking care in advance before a catastrophic “flood” – related to our time of climate change – of AI and that is adopted in the field of human-machine relations and hinges on Blumenberg’s existential metaphor of “Shipwreck with spectator”: “Computers are universal machines, their potential extends uniformly over a boundless expanse of tasks. Human potentials, on the other hand, are strong in areas long important for survival, but weak in things far removed. Imagine a “landscape of human competence,” having lowlands with labels like “arithmetic” and “rote memorization,” foothills like “theorem proving” and “chess playing,” and high mountain peaks labeled “locomotion,” “hand-eye coordination” and “social interaction.” (…) I propose that we build Arks as that day nears,and adopt a seafaring life!” a metaphor of Hans Moravec cited an illustrated in: Max Tegmark on general Human-Level AI: in Life 3.0: Tegmark, Max. Life 3.0.: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. New York (New York): Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, 74-75.

19. Hans Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986). The problematic of Blumenberg’s impossibility of living our lives in harmony with the world (and its respective loss) is the problematic of historicity, finitude and contingence that we all die too soon. Cf: César González Cantón “Absolutism: Blumenberg’s Rhetoric as

ience of human self-conservation given as a necessary gaining of distance

or gap or deviation of our sense-funding human lived lifetime from an

all-consuming absolutism of reality

_{, given in measurable or countable}

world-time.

Another example would be the dichotomy of cosmological and

scientific time of clocks and physical chronometric dating techniques

vs. phenomenological and subjective time of duration, or existential

experience of temporality in retention, presence/ presentification and

protention, while others think time as a negative experience or even a

negative

_{theology of time, opposed to positive measurement and vice}

versa, a loss or a lack or even a time out of joint.

Can we actually access the otherness of time by ourselves in solitude?

However, only by the encounter with the other, we cannot enter the river

of time twice at the same time, if not we have even to see that time as

other might be the existential threat of a “river without shore” (Fluss

ohne Ufer

_{), without a clarifying “arrow” of time and its directionality or}

orientation, but as complex system of an ocean

_{and with multiple and}

parallel currents of recurring, but never repeating times dependent on the

currents of others. We have (too) little time together, let us use it

care-fully to maintain not purely memory in itself but as a rebellion against the

indifference of time, in which not forgetting might be a rebellion against

humanity (Blumenberg

_{), but instead: let us think and maintain the}

expe-rience of the other in the sense of Lévinas.

As metaphorology becomes a crisis phenomenon of the ideal of

logo-centrism, Blumenberg has pointed out that metaphors and rhetoric are no

less important for human thought, including philosophy

_{as paradigms}

Ontological Concept” (103-142). In: Hans Blumenberg, Nuovi paradigmi d’analisi a cura di Alberto Fragio e Diego Giordano. (Roma: Aracne, 2011), 106.

20. For Blumenberg the human relation towards reality is metaphoric: “Der menschliche Wirklichkeitsbezug ist indirect, umständlich, verzögert, selektiv und vor allem ‘metaphorisch’”. Hans Blumenberg, Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben. Reclam: Stuttgart, 115.

21. Michael Theunissen, Negative Theologie Der Zeit. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). 22. Cf. Hans Henny Jahnn, Fluss Ohne Ufer: Roman in Drei Teilen. Edited by Ulrich Blitz.

(Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2014). 

23. „Sie {die Zeit}ist kein Strom. Sie ist ein Meer.“ Hans Jahnn, Henny. Fluss Ohne Ufer: Roman in Drei Teilen. Teil II, Edited by Ulrich Blitz. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2014, S. 289. 24. Hans Blumenberg, Außenansicht, in: Hans Blumenberg, Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne.

Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 371-373 here: 373.

25. Cf. e.g. Cristian Strub, “Gebäude, organisch verkettet. Zur Tropologie des Systems” (108-135), in: Anselm Haverkamp,. Metaphorologie: Zur Praxis Von Theorie. (Frankfurt

creating entities, and behavior than clear, logical definitions to clarify the

tensions in phenomenology in between a) metaphor and concept b) or

between conceptuality and inconceptuality (Unbegrifflichkeit

_).

This goes beyond the primordial scene in the Aristotelian relation

of cosmos and logos in book Gamma of his Meta-physics

_{. Thus,}

Blumenberg  – beyond Heidegger’s diagnosis

  _{– in his half-method can}

categorically put forward a “meta-kinetics”

_{, a meta  – movement in}

which the history of philosophical concepts does not add a new theory or

model of metaphor, but shows how the pragmatic work on metaphors as

a pragmatics of metaphysics are made fruitful, as in the endless human

processual endeavor to understand not only what is possible to be put into

a scientific explanation, but more so in which way our mind preempts

itself in the images we think with, and how these contribute to the

conjec-tures we make and the time we are with the other. 

Blumenberg’ s metaphorology (1960) is based on the thematization

and clarification of natural philosophical phenomena. Metaphorology,

therefore, is a non-metaphysical treatment of the pragmatic role that

metaphysical structures, for example, “absolute” metaphors play in our

thought and for our hypothetical reasoning that enters very well-defined

functions.

For Blumenberg concepts as well as metaphors act at a distance in

inconceptuality

_{, mostly in the absence of their objects and far from a}

am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009).

26. Hans Blumenberg,  Theorie Der Unbegrifflichkeit. Hrg aus dem Nachlaß von Anselm Haverkamp. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010).

27. Cf., Cassin Barbara & Michel Narcy, La decision du sens: Le Livre Gamma de la Metaphysique d’Aristote, (Paris: Vrin 1989), 10, cited in: Anselm Haverkamp, Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen Zu Einer Metaphorologie Kommentar. (Frankfurt, M.: Suhrkamp, 2013), 232.

28. Cf. Heidegger, Martin. Der Satz Vom Grund. Gesamtausgabe. 1. Abteilung: veröffentlichte Schriften 1914-1970. Vol. 10. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997): 135.

29. “Auch absolute Metaphern haben daher  Geschichte. Sie haben Geschichte in einem radikaleren Sinn als Begriffe, denn der historische Wandel einer Metapher bringt die Metakinetik geschichtlicher Sinnhorizonte und Sichtweisen selbst zum Vorschein, innerhalb deren Begriffe ihre Modifikationen erfahren. “Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen für eine Metaphorologie. Kommentar: Haverkamp. (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt), 16.

30. “Der Begriff ist aus der  actio per distans, aus dem Handeln auf räumliche und zeitliche Entfernung entstanden. “Hans Blumenberg, Theorie Der Unbegrifflichkeit. Hrg aus dem Nachlaß von Anselm Haverkamp. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 8-11; for the topos of  inconceptuality see: Oliver Müller (2011)»Von der Theorie zur Praxis der Unbegrifflichkeit. Hans Blumenbergs Paraethik«, in: Anselm Haverkamp; Dirk Mende (Hg.): Metaphorologie. Zur Praxis von Theorie. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), S. 256-282.

theoretical observational stance of solid ground or neutral fence sitter

starting with a clear horizon

_{. Metaphors are called into their pragmatic}

function even in the incompleteness of the underlying imagination or

thinking of beings limited in time and thus submitted to

pragmatic-eco-nomic restrictions of instrumental reason. In reason, such a pragmatic

performance from a distance includes kinds of objects such as ideas or

rules, as-if (being) – objects that never can be made present: the world, the

I, space and as well the topic: Time as Other. 

It is worthwhile noting that Blumenberg in his thoughts on

inconcep-tuality states that time cannot be treated as a finite or well-circumscribed

object. This non-object does not make a stand against x (Gegenstand). The

inconceptual, thus, in its very imaginations and representations is always

already a lack of completeness.  Nonetheless, rationality approximates us

with such a competence besides our distance towards the phenomena of

time, space or world. The distance towards the reality of the “Gegenstand,”

however  – makes another way of approaching time necessary: a

meta-phorology of the  absolute

  _{metaphors of temporality such as  a clock}

31. Blumenberg in his posthumous studies on the metaphorology of springs, streams and icebergs – Hans Blumenberg, Quellen, Ströme, Eisberge. Ed. aus dem Nachlass by Bülow Ulrich von and Dorit Krusche. (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012). Referes to the paradoxes and conceptual difficulties that the last Husserl gets when trying to combine his concept of the phenomena in the “horizon” metaphoric of a dawning clearity and the Heraclitan “stream” metaphorics into harmony. As Heraclitus said that no one could climb into the same river twice, Blumenberg insists that this is an absolute metaphor, and one of the earliest achievements of philosophy, that reality cannot be held fast because it is not what it seems to us. Thus, Blumenberg shows Husserls first traces of difficulties of the philosophical aim to go towards the things themselves. Metaphorological contradictions of the “Schwierigkeiten an der Sachen selbst” hint to the fact that a reflective self is unable to stay on a solid grounds of a single point of view. Therefore, we cannot speak from a clarified temporal position in which a clear separation of retention or protention would be valid, but actually we are pulled together with the waters of the temporal subjective stream in which the researcher has even to swim with the stream, in order to describe phenomena of the flux of the world. Cf. Friedrich, Alexander, Philosophisches Heimweh. Eine metaphorologische Studie zur Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. In: Alexander Friedrich, Petra Gehring, and Andreas Kaminski, eds. “Metaphern Als Strenge Wissenschaft.” (7-41),  Journal Phänomenologie 41/2014 (2014): 38.

32. Blumenberg notes that ideality of concepts of reason necessarily imply a weakness in contextual determination and thus lead to the pragmatic functional use and performance of absolute metaphors that in their resistance towards context are called absolute (Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit, 65); Kaminski notes that in Blumenbergs Paradigmata especially metaphors of truth have been treated as absoluteness of absolute metaphors in four characteristics. 1) Concepts cannot equivalently substitute absolute metaphorical expression. 2) In the sense of Blumenberg absolute metaphors such as Power or powerlessness of truth, the world or universe as machine, the book of nature in which

without indicators of hour, minutes or seconds or any other abstract entity

of measurement, the “river of time” in which one as an embodied and

limited being never enters twice the same, or the uncanny encounter of

the Other in which time is given as a “face-to-face” (Levinas) beyond mere

phenomenology of the social encounter. Thus, the alterity that we

expe-rience within these technical “Halbzeuge

_{” in the metaphors we apply to}

experience and understand time. Time in Lévinas is merely approachable

as a paradoxical metaphorical mise-en-scene of distance that is proximate

or proximate distance:

All description of this “distance-proximity” could not be elsewise than

approximate or metaphorical, since dia-chrony of time in them is the

non-figural meaning, the literal meaning, the model.

Do we always live in the same time? How could an economically

synchronized totality notion of time in measuring timelines, deadlines

one can read are non-verifiable or theoretically decidable. 3) Absolute Metaphors provide for a pragmatic orientation, they give a structure to a world, representing the never fully experienced totality of reality. 4) Absolute Metaphors are models and “settings” (Blumenberg) between I and the world about totality horizons that are read off and “push through to the expressive sphere in form of metaphors” (Blumenberg, Paradigms, 7.). Kaminski, Andreas, “Was heißt es, daß eine Metapher absolut ist? “,  Journal Phänomenologie,  In: Alexander Friedrich, Petra Gehring, and Andreas Kaminski, eds. Metaphern Als Strenge Wissenschaft. Journal Phänomenologie 41/2014 (2014), 47-62.

33. In the Brother Grimm’s lexicon of the German Language Halbzeug gets the following – short – entry referring to the example of use in an unfinished papermaking process in teh Romantic Time. This is exemplified by the paper that is still in the making or a “lumpen” or “mesh”, that is a gross structure that has not passed the paper press and cut in exact measured pieces and as such is not a finely workout out piece of paper: “halbzeug, m.in der papiermühle noch nicht völlig zerstoszene lumpen: die gröblich zerstampften lumpen oder der halbzeug. Beckmann technologie (1777)s. 71. davon halbzeugkasten, trog zur aufnahme des halbzeuges. Jacobsson2, 195a “Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm. 16 Bde. in 32 Teilbänden. Leipzig 1854-1961. Quellenverzeichnis Leipzig 1971. halbzeug  bis  haldung (Bd. 10, Sp. 221  bis  223). Online-Version Wörterbuchnetz  – Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. Accessed October 30, 2019. http://woerterbuchnetz.de/ cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigle=DWB&mode=Vernetzung&lemid=GH01348#XGH01348. 34. Emmanuel Lévinas, Time and the Other: and Other Essays. Introduction. Translated by

Richard A. Cohen. (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987).

35. Christina Beckert as well speaks of an economic life and the invention of a totalitarian economic society in which the relation of the I with totality is essentially economic and opposed to an absolute future never mine or canny in the sense of feeling mine or at home, that I would formulate as the base of the absolute uncanny and its metaphorology in Levinas, not related to a home to come back to or a Dasein in this world, Beckert, Cristina. Subjectividade e Diacronia No Pensamento De E. Levinas. 2nd ed. (Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa, 2010), 91-92.

and spatial diagrams have ever been my or our time in the encounter of

the other? Time as diachronic and deferred to a future that I can’t possess

in the human encounter of the face to face of the other becomes social

for Levinas and is in itself diachronic. Temporality is not seen here as a

classical phenomenological egologic – nor as a minor physical problem of

measuring time as shown by artefacts of mechanical clocks or seasonal

calendars of natural time and its forecast. Instead of a meteorological, we

follow what can be called a metaphorologic account of uncanny time. 

In uncanny time we seem not to be home at such an economically

invested synchronized time: in a  there is  of time as such, and such a

time, we stay out-of-time: in full solitude. As a result of a “horror” the

plenty solitude, which is the opposite of nothingness, I treat techno-social

uncanniness of time. We go wrong in thinking that by synchronizing to

an economic-technological model of time that is never ours, we would be

in time. However, we seem to recover time on weekends, to recover sleep

time that we lost in insomnia, or to spare some erotic time and even family

time beyond the counting clocks and bells of artefacts and automata of

time, repaying ourselves for our permanent payments of being out of

time. The “Men in Grey”, the time-thieves of Michael Ende’s much more

than a children’s novel “Momo” come to mind, that rule our

commod-ified temporal world or the surreal, playful automaton that we have to

animate with our muscle power and work-contracts of “X” horas and “0”

payment of the surreal “Fulfillment Center Machine” of Tim Hutchin

_{: the}

time of the world – “Weltzeit” – implies for Heidegger something uncanny,

an Unheimliches. 

Fleeing from a “Unzuhause”

_{, a nonhome in itself already is present}

in Freud’s Text from 1919 on the Uncanny treating the paradoxical

a-synchronic primary attraction and secondary repulsion and recall of a

36. Tim Hunkin, “Fulfillment Centre In Use Youtube”, February 12, 2019. https://www. youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=Nr4fdXtRJXQ&feature=emb_title.

Cf. http://www.timhunkin.com/a225_fulfilment-center.htm

37. Mark Fisher in his book “The Weired and the Eerie” criticizes Freud’s equaling the term “uncanny” with both the “eeri”, ghostly and the “weired”, strange: “Perhaps my delay in coming round to the weird and the eerie had to do with the spell cast by Freuds concept of the unheimlich. As is well known, the unheimlich has been inadequately translated into English as uncanny; the word which better captures Freud’s sense of the term is the “unhomely”. The unheimlich is often equated with the weird and the eerie  – Freuds own essay treats the terms as interchangeable. But the influence of Freuds great essay has meant that the unheimlich has crowded out the other two modes.” Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 9.

non-treated trauma in the past childhood

_{. As a result of this Freud}

criti-cizes Jentsch’s concept of the uncanny. He opposes Jentsch’s view that the

uncanny is a result of cognitive dissonance or intellectual uncertainty of

something unfamiliar of not knowing where one was or unfamiliar with

something, beyond the equation of the unfamiliar=unheimlich. Thus,

Freud’s Jentsch critic is directed against the situational account of novelty

in the metaphor of the unhomely.

2.1 The Unhomely in human-technology relations: metaphorological

variations of the uncanny valley

Roboticist such as Mori, see the Uncanny as a construction problem

of similitude and mimicry or verisimilitude with human morphology. In

Mori´s view the question is posed how to overcome the feeling of uncanny

in relation to machines which he describes with the metaphor of the

uncanny valley (Mori), uncanny cliffs (Bartneck, Kanda Ishiguro, Hagita

2007

_{; 2009}

_{), uncanny walls}

_{, an uncanny mountain}

_{(Newman, 2015).}

38. In Freud’s view of a return of a repressive past, the story of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” is staged in a mise en scene of horror as the tearing out of the eyes as repressed castration anxiety that then is interpreted in the Sandman character as a demonized father. The story thus evokes for the father of psychoanalysis the horrors of childhood, which – deviated and repressed into the unconscious – would be still eerie in us and would then be recalled while reading.

39. Christoph Bartneck, Takayuki Kanda, Hiroshi Ishiguro, and Norihiro Hagita. “Is The Uncanny Valley An Uncanny Cliff?” RO-MAN 2007  – The 16th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2007. https://doi. org/10.1109/roman.2007.4415111.

40. Christoph Bartneck, Takayuki Kanda, Hiroshi Ishiguro, and Norihiro Hagita. “My Robotic Doppelgänger – a Critical Look at the Uncanny Valley.” RO-MAN 2009 – The 18th _{IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication,}

2009. https://doi.org/10.1109/roman.2009.5326351.

41. Angela Tinwell, Mark Grimshaw, and Andrew Williams. “The Uncanny Wall.” International Journal of Arts and Technology 4, no. 3 (2011): 326. https://doi.org/10.1504/ijart.2011.041485. 42. “This can be seen most clearly in the central section of The Universe of Things: a series of

experiments in inverting the “uncanny valley.” Shaviro doesn’t coin a phrase, but we could call the phenomenon that interests him “the uncanny mountain,” meaning something like: “a human agent’s rise in vitality as it becomes increasingly object-like.” Whitehead serves as Shaviro’s guide in navigating this “uncanny mountain.” In The Universe of Things Shaviro looks in particular at Whitehead’s close reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1817 poem Mont Blanc. By way of Whitehead, Shelley also provides Shaviro with The Universe of Things’ title. (“My own, my human mind, which passively/ Now renders and receives fast influencings,/ Holding an unremitting interchange/ With the clear universe of things around”)”. It is not too far of a stretch, then, to think of Mont Blanc as the original “uncanny mountain.” Kurt Newman, “Panpsychism’s Labyrinth. Steven Shaviro’s New Book Teaches

All these metaphors of eeriness and disorientation or undecidability in

double perception should be confronted with an “uncanny canniness”

in which machines have absorbed our homeliness, but still stay strange

artificial players while we play with them. Recently the creation of AI

Avatars and AI faces have at their foundation an eeriness of wishing to

meet with someone, even if actually a something that is dead or inanimate

and sooner or later crashes over our expectation of encountering a living

face and vice versa.

With Levinas solitude could be at the core of the uncanny, as the

moment and duration when we fall out of time, when the encounter with

the socio-technical other gives way to finding in-animated objects that we

endowed only with our life in the sense of Norbert Wiener. We only hear

a disturbing horrible silence in sleeplessness without exit of an disturbing

“there is”

_{in which uncanny sounds are described as “incessant buzzing}

that fills each silence” in the “there is” il y a, in which we do not encounter

a living face, but we are  again and again a subject separated from the

given. Because time in Levinas is given as a social and ethical encounter.

Let us thus introduce a preliminary metaphorology of the uncanny in

human-techno encounters such as Uncanny valleys, asking if the design

idea of overcoming

_{the technological uncanny valley in human automata}

relation is actually feasible.

Us How to Navigate in a World Where Objects Are Peers.” The New Inquiry, April 18, 2015. https://thenewinquiry.com/panpsychisms-labyrinth/.

43. “In playing against such a machine, which absorbs part of its playing personality from its opponent, this playing personality will not be absolutely rigid. The opponent may find that strategems which have worked in the past, will fail to work in the future. The machine may develop an uncanny canniness. It may be said that all this unexpected intelligence of the machine has been built into it by its designer and programmer. This is true in one sense, but it need not be true that all of the new habits of the machine have been explicitly foreseen by him.” Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc. A comment on certain points where cybernetics impinges on religion. (Cambridge. Mass. MIT Press 1964), 21-22.

44. “Essence stretching on indefinitely, without any possible halt or interruption, the equality of essence not justifying, in all equity, any instant’s halt, without respite, without any possible suspension, is the horrifying there is behind all finality proper to the thematizing ego, which cannot sink into the essence it thematizes. (…) It is the incessant buzzing that fills each silence, where the subject detaches itself from essence and posits itself as a subject in face of its objectivity. A rumbling intolerable to a subject that faces itself as a subject and assembles essence before itself as an object. But its own subtraction is unjustifiable in an equal woven fabric, of absolute equity. The rumbling of the there is is the non – sense in which essence turns, and in which thus turns the justice issued out of signification.” Otherwise than Being 163, my emphasis

45. Tom Geller, “Overcoming the Uncanny Valley.” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 28, no. 4 (2008): 11-17. https://doi.org/10.1109/mcg.2008.79.

The unhomely bustling of essence – there is:

The other term of the alternative would likewise lie within this closure

and these walls, but it would consist in letting itself be tempted by the

labyrinths that open in the instant extracted from its retentions and its

protentions – in the pleasure which is still not enough of a “cross section

of time” in an instant, is still a dream running along the edge of

night-mares and symbolisms, and seeks another time and a “second state” in

intoxication and drugs, which are the far off outcomes or prolongations

of the Epicurean innocence and purity. In it nonetheless pleasure was

separated from the responsibility for another, and already love separated

from law, and eroticism seeped in. An illusory solution, it is also inside

essence and its play, without finding in essence itself a sense in a new

or older signification. The dilemma is without a resolution; essence has

no exits: to the death anxiety is added horror of fatality, of the incessant

bustling of the there is, the horrible eternity at the bottom of essence.

The technological uncanny has been called a characteristic of

modernity

_{and might be joint with the upcoming of mechanistic world}

views and philosophies and their artefacts such as clocks and automata

that seem autonomous and even human-like. In this line of thought

we should actually invert the perspective of an uncanny valley, to be

overcome in Human-machine interface design as proposed by Mori – who

rather follows Jentsch than Freud’s fear, dread and horror related to the

uncanny. Against Mori, I would argue less for building an uncanny valley

roadmap to overcome it in human-robot relations design in which human

face-interfaces can make such encounters “more human”. Neither would

I argue for a better hermeneutic understanding through robotics research

what makes robots become similar to humans, finding out about the ideal

dosage of human-likeness, and less even I would argue for design rules for

creating devices “comfortable” for humans to accept. Norbert Wiener, on

the other hand, proposed an interesting twist in his “uncanny canniness”

46. Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being. Or beyond essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 176.

47. Cf. “We ask  – where does the uncanny come from? Why does it keep returning? Could it be that the uncanny is a distinctively modern experience? /While the uncanny has of course been significant as a theme in literature since at least the high Gothic, it is Freud’s paper of 1919 that has become the key cultural resource. (…) Given a further fillip by the publication of Derrida’s Specters of Marx in 1994, the influence of the uncanny throughout the academy was such that by 1998 Martin Jay could refer to it as the ‘master trope’ of the decade.” Collins, Jo, and John Jervis. Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

when referring to us humans playing a game with machines and that on

a later stage these machines besides being created by us even alter

them-selves adopting habits in an uncanny canniness, that we might not

distin-guish anymore.

In Jentsch’s 1906 account “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen” of the

uncanny the psychological unsure feeling and doubt and a cognitive

disso-nance or intellectual uncertainty between aliveness and non-animate-ness

is put at the core of the Heimlich/unheimlich dynamics that has temporal

breakup points. Hereby, Jentsch brings the hyperreality of a wax figure

and human-like live-size automata into play.

These automata perform complex tasks  – playing musical

instru-ments or dancing  – and their seemingly or scarily autonomous

activ-ities such as playing a trumpet or showing movement convulsions as

primary reasons for uncanniness in human reactions surprise us and lead

according to Jentsch to intellectual dissonance in perception when the

anticipated attribution of aliveness linked to the artistic design of

arti-ficial humans, fails to achieve its purpose and the simulation of special

effects that the mechanic constructions and simulations of such technical

mechanical objects as androids, sex-robots and human-like technical

artefacts and their computer simulations including Avatars or

comput-er-generated images (CGI’s) and characters show leave us with an feeling

of strangeness.

This overwhelming surprise effect can as well be described in one of

the double notions of technology as Aristotle proposed – beside techné – in

mechane: an overpowering effect in technology is put forward in which

the fine mechanics of such artificial objects become verisimilar to human

alive movement and thus create special effects of appearing as-if being

a human, including the simulation of directional eye-gaze, artificial

“consciousness” or affective response. In terms of imitation and

substi-tution of a perceptual object that is animated but still is a non-alive thing

Jentsch reminds us on a situation when a supposedly non-moving tree

48. Ernst Jentsch,. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906).” Angelaki 2, no. 1 (1997): 7-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697259708571910. Here p. 11 Freud as well mentioned the aesthetic instantiation of the uncanny and examines the ETA Hofmann fiction story as well the Sandman (1817). While in Jentsch the female robot automaton Olympia lies at the core of the Uncanny for Freud it is located in the character of the Sandman himself, as an uncanny figure who tears out children’s eyes.

trunk is substituted in our illusionary perception by a giant snake

_{. This}

temporally de-phased perception of a fixed object that becomes alive in

an instant, but in the moment of the factual refutation of the illusionary

perception is located at the core of the techno-social uncanny.

Mori’s Diagram as Metaphor

The roboticist Mori had revived the concept of the uncanny in the

spatial metaphor derived from a diagram of an uncanny valley in order to

understand why we feel a certain eeriness in relation to technological

arte-facts specifically robots/AI/Avatars that mimic humans. Mori’s uncanny

valley diagram is a metaphor. If we amplify the notion of metaphorology of

philosophical and scientific concepts to images used in scientific research,

that have as a foundation imagery a geometric symbolism

_(Blumenberg

2010) in general and a metaphorization of geocentrism, inscribed in a

scientific research field such as in the human factors research on

human-robot interaction, then we can state that the symbolic line diagram

repre-sentation, that forms a valley-like graphic structure introduced in 1970

has been a very fruitful scientific-technological metaphor: the “Uncanny

Valley”, exploring implications for human – robot interaction and

comput-er-graphics animation, or proposing models of biological

_{and social}

50. “someone sat down in an ancient forest on a tree trunk (…) to the horror of the traveler, this trunk suddenly began to move and showed itself to be a giant snake.” Jentsch, 11 51. Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for Metaphorology [Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie],

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag). Translated from the German and with an afterword of Robert Savage. (Ithaka New York, Cornell University Press, 2010), chapter X “Geometric Symbolim and Metaphorics”, 115-132: Cf. Mori 1970: “An example of a function that does not increase continuously is climbing a mountain  – the relation between the distance (x) a hiker has traveled toward the summit and the hiker’s altitude (y)  – owing to the intervening hills and valleys. I have noticed that, in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley (Figure 1), which I call the uncanny valley.”

52. Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley [From the Field].” Translated by Karl Macdorman and Norri Kageki. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 19, no. 2 (June 6, 2012): 98-100. https://doi.org/10.1109/mra.2012.2192811. Reprint from: M. Mori, “The uncanny valley,” Energy, vol. 7, no. 4, 1970 (in Japanese), here, 99.

53. In the realm of Social Neuroscience a double notion of temporal dimension is underlined in the sense of a prediction of an expected event that does not turned out as expected. The Technological uncanny is thus related to technology as prediction (Kaminski) or expectation, that in the situation of the technological uncanny is proven wrong. Cf. Saygin, Ayse Pinar, Thierry Chaminade, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Jon Driver, and Chris Frith. “The Thing That Should Not Be: Predictive Coding and the Uncanny Valley in Perceiving Human and Humanoid Robot Actions.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 7, no.

causes. Interestingly, as counterexample to an uncanny handshake Mori

introduces a theater metaphor of the uncanny, in the human encounter

with a traditional Japanese Bunraku puppet, that in its cultural

accep-tance of play is endowed with higher homeliness values.

Uncanny Cliff

The uncanny valley appears to be more of a cliff than a valley since even

pictures of humans do not reach the level of pictures of toy robots. It has

to be acknowledged that there is a small upward trend again towards

highly human-like entities, which results in a small valley.

In the variation of the metaphoric geologic morphology, the uncanny

cliff, this geographic metaphor has as well been transformed into an

uncanny slope, with only a weak uncanny effect

_{. Tinwell and colleagues,}

however, oppose the idea that the uncanny valley can actually be overcome

and thus introduce a permanence and durational account of uncanniness

in the relation of technical artefacts and human-like automata and human

beings and the permanent reintegration of the weird. They propose a

broader than mere lookalike appearance – mimetic approach to the

tech-nological uncanny, going into the realm of behaviour and introduce the

habituation effect of seeing something as an artefactual reproduction and

not as a real, alive human being:

(…) Our results imply that: (1) perceived familiarity is dependent upon

4 (2011): 413-22. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsr025. See as well: “As numerous studies have succeeded in exposing such visual imperfections and connected them to negative evaluations, the phenomenon has been framed by theories such as pathogen avoidance (Ho, MacDorman, & Pramono, 2008), mortality salience (MacDorman & Ishiguro, 2006) or the fear of psychopathic individuals (Tinwell, Abdel Nabi, & Charlton, 2013). Pursuant to these evolutionary psychological approaches, the aversion against human-like entities with slight defects might serve as part of a behavioral immune system (Schaller & Park, 2011), shielding individuals against potential dangers to themselves or their progeny.” Stein, Jan-Philipp, and Peter Ohler. “Venturing into the Uncanny Valley of Mind – The Influence of Mind Attribution on the Acceptance of Human-like Characters in a Virtual Reality Setting.” Cognition 160 (2017): 43-50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.010.

54. Christoph Bartneck, Takayuki Kanda, Hiroshi Ishiguro, and Norihiro Hagita. “Is the Uncanny Valley An Uncanny Cliff?” RO-MAN 2007  – The 16th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, August 26, 2007, 368-73. https://doi.org/10.1109/roman.2007.4415111.

55. Jari Kätsyri, Beatrice de Gelder, and Tapio Takala. “Virtual Faces Evoke Only a Weak Uncanny Valley Effect: An Empirical Investigation with Controlled Virtual Face Images.” PsyArXiv. July 17 (2018). Doi:10.1177/0301006619869134.

a wider range of variables other than appearance and behaviour and (2)

for realistic, human-like characters, the Uncanny Valley is an impossible

traverse, is not supported fully by empirical evidence and the concept is

better replaced with the notion of an Uncanny Wall.

Thus, an Uncanniness of temporal dissonance that is given in an

after-moment of realization that the supposedly human is in fact a

tech-nical machine or artefact, in the sense of Tinwell is given in a constant

collapse that we could call an epoché of the homely. Thus, the uncanny

does not disappear once it is clear in the encounter that the machine is

almost like us, but still not us at all. Therefore, in temporal habituation the

uncanny is cemented as a “wall” that disables the epoché of the homely as

difference again and again to surge from outside the familiar.

2.1.1

Uncanny hands: From techno-hand shake to the plasticity of

the body in the rubber hand illusion and OBE’s

Mori introduced the Uncanny Valley in a mise-en-scéne of a typical

close human-human encounter that he now turns into a human-robot

encounter in the situation of a creepy nightly handshake with an prosthetic

artificial hand

_{, in which touch is a confirmation/ negation of a visual}

human morphological shaped prosthetic hand and the clear function

of the artificial hand is to substitute a missing human hand by a

tech-nical substitute. The Uncanny valley in the sense of the roboticist Mori,

proposed in 1970, is first of all thought of as a graphical – mathematical

curve or line that is interpreted as a valley. Mori reflects on the human

affinity for movement that seems human like, even though programmed

in which the velocity, acceleration, and deceleration should be mimicking

human movement. On the other hand he is cautious about the contrary

side effects of too much affinity that can’t hold true over time when he

refers to a prosthetic hand that in his diagram would be located near

the bottom of the uncanny valley and then suddenly is observed in its

movement that only intensifies the spectators sensation of eeriness.

56. Angela Tinwell, Mark Grimshaw, and Andrew Williams. “The Uncanny Wall.” International Journal of Arts and Technology 4, no. 3 (2011): 326. https://doi.org/10.1504/ijart.2011.041485. 57. Cf. Mori, 99-100.

Rubber Hand illusion and Out of Body Experiences

Since the famous article of in Botvinick and Cohan (1998) the prolific

“rubber hand illusion”

_{has become a model for multiple investigations}

into the flexibility and malleability and uncanniness of the proprioceptive

body schema, and its forms of experimental-technical manipulations,

regarding its size

_{and its manipulation to effect aberrations in}

multi-sensory integrations such as autoscopic Out of Body experiences (OBE’s)

related to proprioceptive drift of the body schema towards the inclusion

of artificial limbs of a rubber hand or transformation of self-localizations.

The uncanniness in these strange phenomena are dealing with unstable

or irregular senses of agency, attribution of mineness of a body and the

localizations (Blanke & Arzy 2005) of bodies in space. This

phenomeno-logical otherness of altered body experiences can be founded in the double

notion of the body

_{as a functional, physiological “Körper” that never}

fully corresponds to what a self might experience as “my” lived “Leib”

including its proper body-image and body ownership and 1

_{or second}

person perspective. In an extreme case on the level of neuropsychological

and empirically informed philosophical research in the LAB

_{with help of}

58. Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen. “Rubber Hands ‘Feel’ Touch That Eyes See.” Nature 391, no. 6669 (1998): 756-56. https://doi.org/10.1038/35784.

59. Cooke, E. A. G., and J. K. Oregan. “Size-Manipulation of the Body-Schema Using the Rubber Hand Illusion.” Journal of Vision 6, no. 6 (2010): 862-62. https://doi.org/10.1167/6.6.862. 60. Jason J. Braithwaite, Derrick G. Watson, and Hayley Dewe. “Predisposition to

out-of-Body Experience (OBE) Is Associated with Aberrations in Multisensory Integration: Psychophysiological Support from a ‘Rubber Hand Illusion’ Study.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 43, no. 6 (2017): 1125-43. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000406.

61. Mittelstrass, referring to Helmuth Plessner, distinguishes this double notion of the body very well that in German has two expressions “Leib” and “Körper”: “On the basis for this distinction see Plessner (1970, 11-171). According to Plessner, man is his phenomenological body (Leib) and has it as a physical body (Körper); he is a Leib im Körper as opposed to an animal that is its (physical) body and has it as its phenomenological body (Plessner, 1982).” Mittelstrass, Jürgen. “The Limits of Science and the Limitations of Knowledge”. ALLEA Biennial Yearbook 2002 (11-26). (Amsterdam: ALLEA 2002), 21.

62. Hongfang Wang, Eleanor Callaghan, Gerard Gooding-Williams, Craig Mcallister, and Klaus Kessler. “Rhythm Makes the World Go Round: An MEG-TMS Study on the Role of Right TPJ Theta Oscillations in Embodied Perspective Taking.” Cortex 75 (2016): 68-81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.11.011.

63. Thomas K. Metzinger, “Why Are out-of-Body Experiences Interesting for Philosophers?” Cortex 45, no. 2 (2009): 256-58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2008.09.004.

VR

_{technology to render experimental induction}

_{and repeatability of}

these uncanny embodiment experiences available, and further, the

possi-bility is tested if we can even create the illusion of swapping our entire

body-schema by perceiving an artificial humanoid body as its own

_and

project it outside our localized multisensory physiological body position

_,

a research that has parallels in the neuroscientific research of Out-of-Body

experiences in which even an uncanny body shadow or an artificial feeling

of presence

_{can be technically induced and manipulated by}

electromag-netic stimulation of the brain

_{. Nevertheless, we don’t}

_{have to assume a}

comparison of perceptual and internal body – models as a causal relation

of a fixed self-model.

Recently the uncanny cybernetic idea of technological

transhu-manism in how far our body schema could embody more than two arms or

hands has been put forward in a integration for example four

_prosthetic

hands: But how exactly time

_{does play a crucial factor in the uncanny}

64. Thomas K. Metzinger, “Why Is Virtual Reality Interesting for Philosophers?” Frontiers in Robotics and AI 5 (2018). https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2018.00101.

65. H. H. Ehrsson, “The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences.” Science 317, no. 5841 (2007): 1048-48. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1142175.

66. Valeria I. Petkova, and H. Henrik Ehrsson. “If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping.” PLoS ONE 3, no. 12 (March 2008). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003832. 67. B. Lenggenhager, T. Tadi, T. Metzinger, and O. Blanke. “Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness.” Science 317, no. 5841 (2007): 1096-99. https://doi. org/10.1126/science.1143439.

68. The artistic project of Naomi Lea exploring the feeling of presence and the dis-and reembodied uncanny is very interesting to be explored further as her scientifically based art project makes us clear that the feelings of artificial presence are more widespread than often assumed: cf. Lea, Naomi. “The ‘Ghost’ in the Machine: the Feeling of Presence in a Computer-Mediated Environment.” Interactive Architecture Lab, October 30, 2018. http://www.interactivearchitecture.org/the-ghost-in-the-machine-the-feeling-of-presence-in-a-computer-mediated-environment.html.

69. Shahar Arzy, Margitta Seeck, Stephanie Ortigue, Laurent Spinelli, and Olaf Blanke. “Induction of an Illusory Shadow Person.” Nature 443, no. 7109 (2006): 287-87. https:// doi.org/10.1038/443287a.

70. Piotr Litwin, “Rubber Hand Illusion Does Not Arise from Comparisons with Internal Body Models: a New Multisensory Integration Account of the Sense of Ownership,” 2018. https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27136.

71. Ellen Poliakoff, Sophie O’Kane, Olivia Carefoot, Peter Kyberd, and Emma Gowen. “Investigating the Uncanny Valley for Prosthetic Hands.” Prosthetics and Orthotics International 42, no. 1 (2018): 21-27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309364617744083. 72. Cf. The research of that propose that individual susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion

would depend on individual temporal resolution in multisensory perception, as indexed by a temporal binding window: Costantini, Marcello, Jeffrey Robinson, Daniele Migliorati,